Book Image

Perl 6 Deep Dive

By : Andrew Shitov
Book Image

Perl 6 Deep Dive

By: Andrew Shitov

Overview of this book

Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages consisting of Perl 5 and Perl 6. Perl 6 helps developers write concise and declarative code that is easy to maintain. This book is an end-to-end guide that will help non-Perl developers get to grips with the language and use it to solve real-world problems. Beginning with a brief introduction to Perl 6, the first module in the book will teach you how to write and execute basic programs. The second module delves into language constructs, where you will learn about the built-in data types, variables, operators, modules, subroutines, and so on available in Perl 6. Here the book also delves deeply into data manipulation (for example, strings and text files) and you will learn how to create safe and correct Perl 6 modules. You will learn to create software in Perl by following the Object Oriented Paradigm. The final module explains in detail the incredible concurrency support provided by Perl 6. Here you will also learn about regexes, functional programming, and reactive programming in Perl 6. By the end of the book, with the help of a number of examples that you can follow and immediately run, modify, and use in practice, you will be fully conversant with the benefits of Perl 6.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Creating Pod documentation

Pod is a sublanguage inside Perl 6 used to write documentation. It can be considered as an extended version of comments, which allows more functionality in expressing the content. Pod in Perl 6 is the evolution of the POD (Plain Old Documentation) in Perl 5. In Perl 6, the name is not an abbreviation and thus is not capitalized. In this section, we will examine the syntax of the Pod markup language.

Pod content is placed in the same source file as the Perl 6 program itself. A Pod section is a series of lines containing some textual information. The compiler is switching between parsing Pod and Perl 6 when it sees the beginning and ending marks of the Pod section. Pod syntax is designed to express the semantics of the documentation and to help organize it in a more structured way.

Let's see how you create a Pod block. There are a few types of Pod...